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Saturday, 8 March 2014

It has somehow become politically
incorrect to question the current upswing in the seesaw about multilingualism,
to the effect that we should all dedicate ourselves to learning
languages.

I personally think it’s great fun to
learn languages just because they’re there, probably because
I work with them as a linguist, but there’s
one other reason why I learned the languages that I use, which
is, simply, that I have touse
them. I wouldn’t be able to function in my everyday environments
with a single language. What I find intriguing is the blank
encouragement to learn languages for apparently no other reason than
everyone else saying that we should. Do we knowwhy we’re joining the chorus? Or are we just doing our best
to prove R. W. Emerson’s point
that “Nothing is more rare, in any man, than an act of his own” –
to which Oscar Wilde
added that “Most people are other people”? It grieves me to find
languages ranking among the new desirables, on the strength of
decidedly consumerist hype: what matters is how many you have.

Multilinguals have “many” languages
for the same reason that a lot of people have more than one of
anything, from pair of shoes to smartphones, not out of endemic
acquisitionitis but because they need them for everyday purposes.
Saying this, however, is about as interesting as saying that
monolinguals have one language for exactly the same reasons: we all
acquire whatever number of languages we need to use in our daily
business. Are multilinguals and monolinguals all that different,
then? And is it worth spending time and resources on
spot-the-difference activities? Nothing is easier, in fact, than
finding differences: as the saying goes, we’re all unique just like
everyone else. What grieves me even more is that the current drive to
(apparently) eradicate monolingualism
ends up pitting people against people for yet another reason which
defies rational comprehension.

Multilingualism is not “modern”,
despite the peddling of its conceptualisation as new. It is in fact
so old that our historical records
contain no special mention of it by name: it’s taken for granted.
Using more than one language is, and has always been, natural.
What’s new is not the number of languages that we’ve ever had as
individuals, what is new is this idea that talking about
linguistic arithmetic makes sense.

The idea grew, in all likelihood, out
of current preoccupation with “global” languages, as if they were
also new, which in turn highlights our apparently sudden realisation
that many users of those languages are monolingual – and likely to
have no problem remaining so. After all, they do have a good excuse
for not bothering to walk all the way to the mountain, if the
mountain keeps racing towards them. But this also makes them easy
targets of the charge that there’s something wrong with them for
being unwilling language
learners. Unfairly, I think.

What should we learn languages for?
Language courses routinely offer grammar courses
instead. The conviction behind this choice is roughly equivalent to
believing, say, that swimming courses should offer familiarisation
with aquatic dynamics and the physics of flotation. Monolinguals
don’t need to become multilingual in order to become acquainted with grammar,
if learning grammar is their purpose. But if their purpose is to be
able to use other languages because they’ve found a need to do so,
then their awareness of that need is encouragement enough to learn those languages – just like multilinguals.

Multilingualism isn’t a purpose in
itself, to be worn, as it were, for ornamental purposes,
nor is it something to pitch against monolingualism, as
Western-minded linguistic ideology has conditioned us to do.
“Against”-ideologies are not, I don’t think, the best way of
driving home the physical and mental well-being that multilingualism
is said to promote among human beings. Such mindsets don’t help us
understand multilingualism either, because they go on portraying it
as “special”.
Being different doesn’t mean being better or worse, and striving to
be different from what we are doesn’t mean becoming better or
worse. It just means becoming different. Default or “ideal” human
linguistic states aren’t found in the number of languages that we
have, they’re found in our ability to make sense and make use of
the languages that we need, for our purposes.

I’ll have some more to say about
language learning purposes next time. Meanwhile, let me leave you
with a thought for the day, Shakespeare’s dejection about other kinds
of compulsive gatherers:

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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